The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.

The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.

We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.

I hear you.

We built a product specifically for student-centric work where educators could assess student progress (think Hattie's Visible Learning and similar lines of thinking) and compare student growth against their own previous work. We encouraged educators to quickly tailor the tasks to individual student needs.

Educators (and pedagogues) loved it. But we couldn't gain traction with the buyer persona: Administrators asking "what's in it for me?" Data on improved outcomes wouldn't be immediate, so it was a no buy.

This was exacerbated by Google and Microsoft giving away their office productivity suites repackaged as classroom tools to ensure future market capture. Because you totally want your 8-year-old becoming a Word or Docs or Excel expert right?

So yeah, we have a reality where students don't have really great EdTech—they have tech that's masquerading as EdTech, picking up all the low-hanging fruit and leaving the hard problems of education unsolved (or unexplored).

The company is in the process of folding, and I'm hoping to re-release the software as true open source sometime in the future once all the legal / corporate shutdown stuff is finished.